... the improvement in watts-per-TB is 45%. In addition to consuming less power, the drive operates four degrees Celsius cooler...

nice find!

This isn't going to be reflected for typical users, this is for data centres where it is more power efficient to have 4000 7Tb drives rather than 7000 4Tb drives, that's all. If you only have a single drive then it will use slightly higher power because of the higher rotating mass but you will get higher capacity.

I think this shows how the storage market is going to get more polarised over SSD vs HDD. SSDs are better at many things but HDDs can still win on capacity and cost, this just takes those advantages to another level without closing down on any of an SSD's advantages.

I wonder how long it takes before enough helium leaks out to make the product fail...

That's very cynical, but a good question. I really hope that HGST's 6-years of R&D on this product has fixed that issue otherwise its dead in the water.

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I think this shows how the storage market is going to get more polarised over SSD vs HDD. SSDs are better at many things but HDDs can still win on capacity and cost, this just takes those advantages to another level without closing down on any of an SSD's advantages.

I agree 100%, they both have their own markets, and will continue to do so for a long time.

It would be great to see these products reach the market (next year.?), not least because 7TB drives with drive down the cost of 4TB drives that I want to buy to levels that I find acceptable.

Helium is monoatomic as a gas, just He, not He2. I belive it is even smaller than diatomic hydrogen.

Actually an He atom is even smaller than a single H atom, it is the smallest atom of all despite being more massive.

Something however to consider is that unless it is under greater than atmospheric pressure, why would it leak out? Helium leaks out of balloons more because it is at a higher pressure than atmospheric pressure, making it more likely to escape. In equilibrium for Helium to be escaping you would also be expecting air to leak in. If this was already happening then you'd have far more issues with contaminates getting into the drives already. And do they fill them with plain air currently? I would suspect that there would be many other reasons not to use air normal or even clean air for drive longevity. Pure nitrogen or CO2 are often used for filling something that's got to be kept clean.

IANAP, but I think the relevant concept is partial presure. The partial pressure of the helium inside the drive is higher than the partial pressure of helium outside the drive, so helium will difuse out. Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor will difuse in for the same reason.

If they can process graphene to seal the inside of these drives...then they really ought to be touting their advances in graphene processing - and make a heck of a lot more money doing that then making hard drives

It seems it is aim at data centers, but one thing i took away from reading about it is that as its hermetically sealed it can be submerged in non conductive fluid.Wouldn't a suspended HDD submerged in fluid all but eliminate noise ?

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